With the proliferation of fast food restaurants and the extended business hours of these restaurants, a number of problems have arisen in maintaining a desirable level of cleanliness in both public areas and in the work areas of these restaurants.
As a result of the many different problems which have arisen, there is no single machine which can maintain the floors of fast food restaurants clean under all or most of the circumstances encountered.
One of the primary problems encountered by the owner or operator of a fast food restaurant in connection with maintaining clean floors is that the type of machine which may be the most efficient in cleaning a large, open area (e.g., a conventional "walk-behind" floor scrubber) is not capable of reaching and cleaning locations such as those typically found beneath tables or fixed seating, or in crevices. Such hard-to-access places are found even more frequently in the kitchen area of a restaurant, and it would be desirable, obviously, to have a single machine capable of accessing all conditions normally encountered in a modern fast food restaurant including those in the public areas as well as those in the kitchen or cooking areas. No such machine commercially exists today. In fact, one proposed solution is to install vacuum outlets throughout the building, but such a system is expensive and is limited to collecting loose debris. It is not effective in removing grease or other material adhered to the floor.
Another problem encountered by owners or operators of fast food restaurants in connection with maintaining clean floors is that frequently conventional cleaning methods simply do not accomplish the desired effect. For example, many fast food restaurants clean floors in the public areas as well as in the kitchen by using a conventional mop and pail. This permits the operator to use strong detergents to clean the floor, dissolve grease and loosen grime, but it does not permit recovery of the dirt and debris which has been loosened. That is, mops are effective in applying detergent to loosen dirt and debris, but they remove only that material which clings to the surface of the mop. Moreover, it has been found that some inexperienced help when using a mop may actually spread loosened dirt and grime into areas where it did not even exist before such as on the baseboard of walls or the lower sections of seating supports.
A conventional walk-behind floor scrubber overcomes the problem of dirt removal since it has a vacuum recovery system for collecting and removing spent cleaning solution and the dirt and debris that it contains. However, such walk-behind scrubbing machines do not have the ability to access all locations, such as beneath tables, beneath seating or in narrow spaces.